Best mags for relieving tax season stress

With the tax deadline coming, you might be tempted to gobble aspirin and antacids. Try reaching for these magazines instead.

Time magazine’s special financial issue, Mastering Your Money, is ideal reading for tax season in that it’s depressing. Sure, stocks are up, but so are their risks. Sure, manufacturing is back, but you can’t get that job unless you’re a robot. Housing prices are up, but so are interest rates! How does that relate to taxes? Well, if you’re lazy and delay paying them, you will feel less bad than before, when you foolishly believed you had control over your life. And if you are forced by the IRS to pay a fine for tax evasion, it won’t bother you as much as before “Mastering Your Money” got you thinking about life on Skid Row. Or better yet, how to impersonate a robot so you can get a job in manufacturing. You may even start fantasizing about IRS jail, because at least there is health care there. “Mastering Your Money” is a great comprehensive look at the nation’s financial health in 2014. But for most people, it doesn’t make economic sense to pay $12.99 to learn, in great detail, that things still suck.

It’s not cheating if it’s a cheat sheet. Kiplinger’s provides a clean and easy check list for tax season — perfect for those of us who still have to file. It will ensure you don’t forget easily overlooked deductions, like for job hunting expenses, moving expenses and (sweet!) alimony payments. Kiplinger’s also reminds us of newbies in the tax code, like equal tax status for same-sex marriages. So starting this year, same-sex couples can join hetero confusion over how the tax code still favors marriages in which just one person brings home the bacon — even though that way of life is out of reach for most families. The good news is, if your spouse insists on screwing up your marital tax benefits by getting a good paying job, you can always write off those alimony payments. God bless America. Kiplinger’s also warns us off pot — stocks, that is. “Although the industry is expected to grow like a weed,” most pot companies are still “financial train wrecks,” the mag warns.

Money is probably the most fun of all the personal finance mags this season, although don’t expect a lot in the way of tax advice. No matter. Folks who read these types of mags have probably already gotten their taxes out of the way and will be free to move on to more interesting topics, like Money’s in-depth look at the nation’s mixed emotions about the economy. Apparently, we’re better off financially in that we’ve been growing our savings, but are more worried than ever about losing our jobs. More than 50 percent of folks with under $100,000 a year in household income are living paycheck-to-paycheck. And for people who earn more than $100,000 a year, that number is still high at 37 percent. Money also takes a closer look at the housing market in booming cities, like Fort Worth, Texas, and Tampa, Fla. If you’re moving to one of these cities for a new job and want to buy a home, it might be worth the $5 for advice on how to get the best deal.

How bad has it gotten for Chris Christie, post-Bridgegate? Some of his closest and most important friends are stabbing him in the back in the pages of the New Yorker. Christie “makes you feel that your life’s going to be very unhappy if you don’t do what he says. And it sometimes goes with a lack of thanks,” according to former NJ Gov. Tom Kean, described as Christie’s “longtime mentor and friend.” As a result, Christie has made a lot of enemies. “You get in trouble, they’ll all come out of the weeds, and come at you,” Kean warns. Funny how many similarities the state of New Jersey seems to have with the Baltimore City Detention Center, where according to reporter Jeffrey Toobin, gang leaders run the prison through intimidation and various forms of palm greasing.

In what amounts to a giant black-and-white cookie of an essay that’s of questionable nutritional value, New York’s Jonathan Chait declares that the Obama years have seen something “even more invidious” than a resurgence of racial strife, in which “race has saturated everything as perhaps never before.” Here is yet another example of this magazine getting entirely too worked up over what it reads on Twitter. Indeed, we get numerous examples of what Maureen Dowd wrote, or what Glenn Beck said, or whether Republicans liked “12 Years a Slave,” and what MSNBC said about a mixed-race Cheerios commercial, as if any of this mattered. For a little perspective on what qualifies as “invidious,” we’d suggest you YouTube Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” in the late 1950s.

Time runs an excellent cover story on the prospects for women’s rights in Afghanistan as elections approach and the nation struggles to birth a legitimate democracy. The Taliban are stepping up a campaign of violence and intimidation, and an excellent series of photos tells the story, capturing Islamic extremists rolling through streets armed with machine guns, blowing up houses and forcing women to cover themselves in public. What Afghanistan needs is a Mary Jo White, who is the subject of a nice profile that promises the rehabilitation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was “a broken agency” when she took over, according to the magazine. We like the fact that she plays basketball, despite only being 5 feet tall.